Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  By her own account Stella learned other important lessons in Charles Blyth’s schoolroom, about interaction with peers and her place in the wider world. She soon realised that small boys often enjoy teasing girls. When she complained about her cousin Don’s ways, her mother’s advice was to rise above the teasing, as girls have done from time immemorial.19

  An area of some later importance to Stella in which Mr Blyth was unable to instruct his charges was music. Boys did not learn music in his day, he reflected ruefully. But girls were expected to, and musical skills were highly prized in the bush. Moreover, music was one of the few fields in which Australian girls might respectably aspire to a career. Unfortunately for Stella, neither of her parents was particularly musical.20 Yet Stella Franklin was not to be bereft of an essential accomplishment. A broken-down prospector called Hopkins, said to have once been a distinguished musician, sometimes played Susannah’s piano, and from time to time a piano teacher was employed at Brindabella Station. By 1889, aged nine, Stella had learned the rudiments of the keyboard.21 The Franklin family left Brindabella for good on Tuesday 30 April 1889. There is no hint of this prospect in Stella’s only known letter of that year, a spritely effort written on 2 February to her Aunt Metta, all about calves and chickens and flowers and ‘the blight’ that was afflicting family members. She mentions that her father had been away to vote and inquires about Grandma Lampe’s trip to Melbourne to see the 1888 Exhibition, mentioning also that Mr Blyth had been to say goodbye (because he wished to consult a doctor, not because of the family’s looming departure from Brindabella). Perhaps she was unaware of tension between the Franklin brothers that seems to have developed earlier, or perhaps the move, still some three months away, had yet to impinge — although that seems unlikely since, according to cousin Annie May’s daughters, Ruby and Leslie, Grandma Lampe had long been urging it on the grounds that Brindabella was too isolated if the children became ill and for the sake of their education.22

  The family were barely settled into their new home near Goulburn in time for the birth of Hume Talmage Franklin on 3 July 1889. Grandma Lampe arrived for the event with Linda, who had been staying at Talbingo. Afterwards, in response to impassioned pleas, Stella was allowed to return to Talbingo with her grandmother. There is a vivid account of the trip by train and buggy in Childhood at Brindabella, and the child’s delight at her return gives the memoir its dramatic tension. Although at first the place seemed smaller than when she had last been there, it was late winter when she arrived and it soon came to life again with the arrival of spring.23

  On 14 October 1889, at Talbingo, Stella turned ten. She was now ‘a big girl’, who did her own hair and would soon wear gloves. Problems began to arise. Some would be easily remedied, her weakness at sewing, for example (though the Bridle sisters thought a surviving sampler of 1890 was probably her only bit of fancywork). Others proved more difficult. With a new baby in a new district, things were doubtless stressful for Susannah at the time, so Stella had been allowed the trip back to Talbingo as long as she kept up her lessons. This she did, more or less dutifully, working alone on the verandah. But before long there was no one able to guide her more advanced studies, nor even her music practice. And as the girl rebelled against restraints — was it really the will of God that she should stay inside? — so Grandma Lampe found aspects of her behaviour cause for concern, reproaching her from time to time for ‘running about like a gypsy’, and for being ‘idle like a boy’.24

  Stella’s last days at Talbingo brought a memorable aesthetic experience, the sight of a splendid black snake sunning itself by a creek in the hills:

  A big black snake lay full-length at his ease beside the water in the thin fringe of maidenhair ferns that were sprouting after winter retreat. The creature’s forked tongue flickered rapidly in and out, his new skin gleamed blue-black with peacock tints, a little of his underside was showing like blended scarlet and pomegranate. I stood a fascinated moment . . . The experience was not startling, merely surprising.25

  Given the fear with which most settlers regarded snakes, and the skill and expedition with which they killed them, the child’s response is indeed surprising. Even more so is the fact that the image of the snake in that spot stayed with her for thirty years:

  As I have sat in some great congress in one of the major cities, or in a famous concert hall, or eaten green almonds on a terrace in Turin in the early morning, or worked amid the din of the Krupp guns on an Eastern battle front, or watched the albatrosses in stormy weather off Cape Agulhas, or have been falling asleep in an attic in Bloomsbury, that snake has still been stretched in the ferns beside the creek, motionless except for the darting tongue.26

  As observed in Marjorie Barnard’s early biography of Miles Franklin, this memory of an ineffable moment brings us to the threshold of the unknown in human experience. Barnard interpreted it as Miles Franklin’s first artistic experience and wondered how many more like it occurred in her childhood. Around such insights may be discerned a vague penumbra, suggestive of usually overlooked religious beliefs, or more accurately an aspiration to them, as in Miles’s wonderfully cryptic remark that it takes a greater mind to find God than to lose him. The bush had transcendental powers for her as a child, as for her father and grandfather before her, and she often uses religious language to describe its impact. Of that final immersion in Talbingo in late 1889, she wrote, ‘Heaven could be no more magical and mystical than unspoiled Australia.’27

  2

  NEAR GOULBURN: 1890‒1898

  Remember me to Goulburn, drowsing lazily in its dreamy graceful hollow in the blue distance.1

  When Stella Miles Franklin first saw the site of her new home in the district of Bangalore to the south of Goulburn, she was disappointed by its low contours and scrubby aspect. But the new environment and the novel experience of state schooling soon absorbed her. Although the coming years would often be grim for the Franklin family, and grimmer still for their fictional counterparts in My Brilliant Career, the place had its own appeal, and it was near Goulburn, a sizable colonial city of almost 11,000 people.2

  For John Franklin the new locale represented a bid for freedom. After serious disputes with his brother Thomas, he had, by his own account, ‘visited different places to find a suitable place to take my wife and family’; and on 11 April 1889, at the Goulburn Land Office, he selected on conditional purchase a block of 160 acres (65 hectares) in the parish of Tarago, County Argyle, midway between Goulburn and the smaller southern settlement at Collector on the northern edge of Lake George, where he had been educated. He later added a further 434 acres (176 hectares) by taking out leases on two adjacent blocks, confirmed in the Goulburn Land Court in January 1890 and duly certified five years later. With one John Mather he also purchased a further parcel of mainly freehold land from a neighbour, W. J. Neely, his share being recorded by Susannah as 320 acres (129 hectares), making 914 acres (370 hectares) in all, near enough to the 1000 acres mentioned in My Brilliant Career. His aim was not to become a farmer, as some contemporary documents have it, but a trader in livestock at Goulburn, an occupation for which the years spent on the horse and cattle runs in the mountains further south seemed to equip him, without loss of status.3

  Of the six-roomed house John Franklin built on the hillside of the newly purchased block, only archaeological evidence survives. A cairn halfway up the hill, erected in 1971 by the then owners, the Frazer family, to mark the spot where ‘Miles Franklin lived and wrote her first book’, as the plaque added by the local historical society puts it, commands a view through brittle gums towards a series of lagoons, but the Franklin house itself was situated some metres further up on a slight plateau, now a grass and rubble clearing. Recently relocated lines of foundation and their corner posts, and the probable outline of the separate kitchen, appear to correlate well with extant photographs. These show a typical late nineteenth-century Australian bush house built of weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof and a long low front verandah
. A couple of semi-domesticated shrubs still survive nearby, and further uphill again, in a crevice created by run-off, is what may have been a domestic water catchment.4

  Altogether the new house cost £400, a considerable sum at that time. The expenditure represented John Franklin’s commitment to the new life and the wellbeing of his wife. ‘Dear old Father always wanted to give Mother of the best,’ his eldest daughter wrote fondly, recalling especially a fine kitchen, which had ‘smooth slab walls and a vast hearth with a colonial oven at one side, then an advance on the camp ovens of the neighbours’. It even had a proper ceiling, unlike most kitchens of the day; and the house itself, with its back and front doors and storerooms, was boarded with soft white pine throughout, including the front verandah ends, ‘a great extravagance everyone thought’ and ‘as dainty as a band box’, Miles added, noting that her family always lived ‘housily and socially above our income’.5

  The lands once selected by John Franklin have long since been subsumed within larger properties, and the ‘Stillwater’ site is now inaccessible, except by permission of the owners. However, a good general idea of Stella’s girlhood environs can be obtained from approximately midway along the Thornford road, which links the Federal Highway with what is now a back road from Goulburn to Currawang. From there, looking due south towards Telegraph Hill, the main features present themselves: spare and undulating uplands, reedy valleys with seasonal lagoons, and overhead the high, bright skies of a typical continental climate zone.6

  The address given by John Maurice Franklin for land records in Goulburn in 1890, and as his place of residence on the electoral rolls of democratic New South Wales, was Bangalore. Originally a farm site, Bangalore is now known as Komungla, and the earlier name survives only on topographical maps which pinpoint Bangalore Creek and the Bangalore trig station. Always a sleepy locale, the tiny nineteenth-century community may have been the subject of Stella’s earliest journalistic writings. The sharp comments in some unattributed pieces in the Goulburn Evening Penny Post in the early 1890s sound like hers — and it was from Bangalore that she despatched the manuscript of My Brilliant Career.7

  My Brilliant Career itself describes Bangalore’s location. In the novel, the heroine’s father, Richard Melvyn, believes ‘Possum Gully’ will be ideal for stock trading: ‘only seventeen miles from a city like Goulburn, with splendid roads, mail thrice weekly and a railway platform only eight miles away, why man, my fortune is made!’ Today there are still a few buildings at Bangalore/Komungla, and a small overgrown cemetery nearby contains the grave of the namesake of the heroine of My Brilliant Career, native-born Penelope Sybilla Macauley, a dairy farmer’s wife who died of pneumonia on 15 July 1899, aged forty-seven. John Franklin was a witness at the burial.8

  The Franklins had arrived at ‘Stillwater’ on 7 May 1889. From then on, we may imagine them traversing the bridle tracks east to the rail to despatch and receive goods and otherwise link up with the wider world, or travelling to the siding on the more roundabout dirt road running through the locality of Thornford, a mile or so north of ‘Stillwater’. Another route to the wider world lay to the west, over the windy high plain to the Goulburn–Collector road, then through Yarra, the nearest postal town. Probably the road to Goulburn was best from Bangalore, but the way through Yarra was more direct and better for riding.9

  ‘Stillwater’ was one of twelve households in the Thornford district.10 Having so many neighbours close by was a new experience and a mixed blessing for young Stella, though probably less so than for her mother. Flinch as she might at the neighbourly calls and the friendly small talk of matrons from surrounding small farms whom she could not help looking down upon, even Susannah sometimes found it handy when stores ran out; and the proximity of numerous large families enhanced the natural exuberance of the Franklin children.11

  Three of Stella’s siblings were now of school age, but it is unclear which of the few local schools they attended. However, we know a new school was built in 1890 south of Thornford and that Stella was enrolled there on her return from Talbingo.12 Miss Gillespie was the teacher-in-charge.13

  No roads went by the new school. But there was a stock route and the school was convenient, especially for the Franklin children, who now had a considerably shorter daily trek than they’d had to Brindabella homestead, less than a mile up the valley from ‘Stillwater’. Miss Gillespie, who boarded with local families during the week and spent her weekends in Goulburn, sometimes drove to school in her horse-and-buggy. There was plenty of room for horses on the hillside site, the location of which is still identifiable from the Thornford road, thanks to the stock route and tree plantings of a century or so ago.14

  At Thornford Public School Stella Franklin obtained an elementary education, which was at that time compulsory in New South Wales to age fourteen, when grade 7 was normally reached, but might be extended to grade 9, by which time pupils would be aged fifteen or sixteen. Exactly how long she spent at the school is now uncertain, but it seems she left in 1894.15

  Thornford School was a positive experience for Stella Franklin. Enrolments increased to over fifty children in the mid-1890s and the school environment improved. A school garden was established — Stella had a flowerbed from the beginning — and over 100 trees were planted, so that soon the school perimeter was ringed with shade. When the school fence collapsed, Miss Gillespie and the boys built another (to keep out the rabbits). They also built a bush shed, and Miss Gillespie procured an apiary ‘for the benefit of scholars’. Best of all, Miss Gillespie held a school picnic every year, during which the prizes were awarded by local dignitaries, and hundreds of people from all over the district came. Trees were planted annually on Arbor Day.16

  Responding to a letter from his ex-pupil on 4 October 1890, Charles Blyth was pleased to think that she now had a chance to show ‘what a smart little girl you are’. He urged her to make the most of her chances, and hoped that, having impressed the school inspector, she would continue to acquire and retain knowledge. This she did. She became one of the stars at Thornford Public.

  Thornford school and its pupils, with Miss Gillespie, c. 1893; Stella Franklin is fifth from left, back row, and her sister Linda is tenth from left, middle row. (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, PX*D250/1, No. 2)

  Even so, her schooling had a great many gaps. She was well grounded in botany but her knowledge of science and physiology is another matter. Like many Australian girls in times past, the heroines of her early novels were unafraid of men but terrified by sex, and often feared that a kiss was enough to cause pregnancy. This ignorance may surprise the modern reader, now unfamiliar with rural codes of respectability, and considering the then superabundance of males in rural Australia, where, as Miles Franklin once tartly observed, ‘every girl who had four limbs and reasonable features lived in a state of siege from the age of fourteen until she capitulated’. No doubt strange practices sometimes occurred in the paddocks, and there probably was some indecent exposure by station hands, but socially speaking, competition for female favours rendered the males more circumspect, and being in ‘a state of siege’ strengthened the cult of respectability for females. Silence on such topics was the norm.17

  The most striking feature of Miles Franklin’s intellectual development during her girlhood (adolescence was not then an established concept) was her voracious appetite for the latest novels. How she responded to Charles Blyth’s request that she send ‘particulars of the books you read’ is unknown, but his replies, discussing the works of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray and other nineteenth-century favourites, are indicative, and doubtless helped shape her taste, which under the additional influence of Miss Gillespie soon ran ahead of his to include the most controversial novels of the 1890s — du Maurier’s Trilby and George Moore’s even more daring Esther Waters.18

  Miss Gillespie was then boarding with the Franklins, and it was she who brought Trilby into the house. ‘It was not considered reading for a young girl, but it could not h
ave escaped me,’ Miles Franklin recalled. In fact, she doted on the story of young British artists in 1890s Paris and the wicked Svengali who captures their model, Trilby, and by hypnotic means makes her a famous singer: ‘what intensity, what poignancy of enjoyment, what glamour!’ Fifty years on, she still felt it retained its ‘infinite seduction’.19

  Many years later, Miles Franklin recorded that the novels she read between the ages of thirteen and twenty remained her favourites. The list included not only the nineteenth-century classics Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, but also The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, a more recent and controversial work in which the bleak farm on the South African veldt undercuts the heroic image of the imperial frontier, and the rebellious heroine, Lyndall, dies in childbirth.

  Whatever the schoolgirl may have gleaned from the reading of romantic novels, she was unprepared for the advances of the local boys. Some never openly declared themselves: an undated 1890s Christmas card simply says ‘from a boy you do not know whose heart beats true to you’. Others were unable to refrain. By the age of fourteen, Stella had already had a suitor who claimed to have loved her for two years but was now leaving with the cattle, since his presence was so obviously distasteful to her. Perhaps he was the prototype for the elderly suitor lampooned in the sketch ‘Gossip by the Way’. The jaunty response to unwanted suitors in My Brilliant Career, that they should send their love to her father, who would put it in a bottle for the Science Museum in Goulburn (he once donated a centipede in spirits to the museum), seems in retrospect to prefigure Miles Franklin’s final stance, that romantic love was illogical and human sexual energy was far in excess of all needs for propagating the species. But that was much later. Looking back, she described herself during her second decade as ‘bewildered and tormented and rebellious’.20